


Mancinella

by providets



Category: Vampire: The Masquerade, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, Drabble Collection, Gen, Introspection, Short
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-20
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-03-07 08:50:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13431216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/providets/pseuds/providets
Summary: loose drabbles as character studies of a Malkavian elder, Loretta. plaguing nightmares, prophecies, a diablerie most foul and, honestly, just an excuse to sit down and write.





	1. prophetess

Her lips are wine and her voice is honey, but her words are vinegar against an open wound. Behind her smile and the glint of her doe eyes lie the secrets of the world, fates foretold through feverish dreams and otherworldly whispers. She is not a prophet of old - she is not that old in the ineffable scheme of things -, but a prophet she is nonetheless; a vessel of forbidden knowledge that kings and queens alike would slay for.

For decades she whispered in the ears of Princes - not the monarchs of faraway lands, though some had been in their courts, once, but Princes of the underworld; she foretold their rise and fall through hushed words and verses, the only sound of her voice through an otherwise practised, almost ingrained mutism. Those who heeded her words had lived the longest - _live_ to this day, some dare say, refuged from fates so bloody they had imagined them countless times in their minds' eye. And there were those who didn't listen, the ones who rejected her words as if diseased they were, lies from the tongue of a treacherous snake urging them to err and be cast out of their own Edens.

At her innermost she was privy to sounds and colours, to victory and sorrow they could only hope to touch with frosty fingertips like moths attracted to the tempting flame. But this constant influx - this open spring that ever sprouted not unlike the one she'd drank of as a mere human on a warm summer night centuries before - had driven her to the edge of her sanity. A prophetess, cursed mad in the blood twofold, cursed to see and to hear and to _feel_ what others took to themselves as wishful thinking; _what if_ s ripe with ambition, ignorant to the burden of a mind that lived several realities at once. To scars of the body and the mind alike, to screams in the night, heavy chains and blood drawn where it should have never been.

Nowadays, her whispers are no more: silent, contained, sewn at the origin with threads of iron and will. And she waits for the Final Nights in the confines of a candle-lit room. Her brood - what's left of it anyway - has long since gone its own way, but she is not alone, never alone.


	2. gaze

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "(...) and her eyes, her eyes like bright orbs, wide and only half-lost, only half-found in the midst of the reality around them."

She sauntered with the same delicate movements of a fox on the hunt: her steps were light, her every move delicate and delicately _contained_. He first saw her from behind, auburn locks concealing most of her figure as she ambled through colourful curtains and thick rope holding up tents bustling in a circus of light, sound and smell however to him these felt, all of a sudden, as if they were miles away. There was something odd in the way she swayed: it was too cautious, too cautious to his keen eye at least - immortality had its perks; the acuity of sight and hearing were but one of a handful.

  
Unknowingly to his conscious mind he had followed along ,and his steps led him to her in a game of cat and mouse (but which was which?). When she turned (just a slight movement, just enough to turn her face to the side with a subtle shrug of a shoulder) he saw: the marble-like pallid skin, marred with dark circles under and around her eyes, the tinted lips too red to be natural even by _canaille_ standards and her eyes, her eyes like bright orbs, wide and only half-lost, only half-found in the midst of the reality around them. A reality that, he considered, was hardly fitting for either of them; yet Fate had its way to unfold and to unfold their destinies along with it. 

Those bright orbs met his and for the first time since he'd spotted her, he found himself incredibly aware of his own existence, of the blood churning in his empty husk, of the hard lump he had to swallow despite being _certain_ it hadn't been there minutes before. Then suddenly her gaze was no longer distant, but piercing, knowing - like that of a parent concealing a truth from a curious child, or that of an elderly professor delivering an especially difficult question - and he was overcome with a strong feeling of (almost) vulnerability. Hot, uncomfortable, uneasy. 

 

(Those feelings had never suited him. Weakness, as it were, never did.)

 

She smiled before turning her head, ultimately, as if he was never even there and, for a brief moment, he very nearly let her go.

Very, very nearly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i still have no idea what i'm doing, but This Is Nice


	3. forget-me-not

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This fixation - if you could call it that - was driving him down dangerous territories and he was sure she knew. She couldn't be that merciful.

"You carry a cross heavier than you realize."

 

Her words were out of place; an unsurprising for one of her kin, creatures of whispers and scattered thoughts; she was a little closer to their Father, a little more composed down her line - call it luck if you will - but it would be a mistake to take that as an additional speck of sanity. 

The room was brightly lit, the mimicry of daylight for the damned, and the sound of violins provided an enchanting tune albeit haunting in its subtlest notes. He sat beside her on one of the velvety armchairs - sat up straight, though she leaned against the padded arm, twirling the cup of red ambrosia with her fingertips before settling it on the tiled floor beneath them. His own glass had been discarded on a side table, not unlike their peers', but for the moment every other voice was drowned out as if there were only the two of them there; his gaze shifted from her lips (had he been staring?) to her eyes and he found himself inching closer, found her sitting back against the arm of the sofa, until the space between them was uncomfortably small and he could smell the almost flowery scent of her hair.

 

"Don't we all? We're _damned_ ," he offered, now merely inches from her. Had they lived as humans did then surely she'd have felt his breath hot against her lips. But they were cold, dead really, and yet she smiled, her expression accompanied by a high note in the background.

 

"Your burdens are heavier than most," she retorted and he couldn't help but to glance at her lips again.

This fixation - if you could call it that - was driving him down dangerous territories and he was sure she knew. She must. She couldn't be that innocent. She wasn't even that merciful.

 "I could make you forget."

 

But she didn't.

 

The weight of that night wouldn't leave him for as long as he survived.


	4. eulogy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vicious, voracious, venomous, vile.

When Loretta spoke, the words took on a form of poetry; raw, intense, immersed into the very fabric of an emotional plane that surrounded the listener. Words were thus blooming flowers, but also sharp thorns: a blessing or a curse, depending on whom they fell upon. When they did.

 

Her eulogy to her brood was the bittersweet conjunction of both: a heartfelt remembrance of the seven beautiful inheritors to her bloodline, seven like the heavenly virtues her mortal self had once revered in all their religious significance. Seven like the sins they had rotted into and shamelessly embodied - in her decadent mind, that is, and to her otherworldly expectations that no one of sane mind could never quite meet.

Like candles they had been snuffed out, one by one, with only rings to remember them by; seven rings, each one a gift from Mother -- from her -- a band of gems to connect them all in blood and in spirit... To bind them together until she lost her mind, until pleasantries became threats and she awoke to the notion that she could unmake what she had made.

 

At her hearing, her words honoured them profoundly, solemn and demure until her train of thoughts hit a bump; a memory warped by whispers and images constructed in a fragile web of Father's creation, a rusty nail under her skin, a thorn in her side.

 

_Vicious, voracious, venomous, vile._

 

All seven, condemned to a fate most wicked; to Hell and Beyond, to a Damnation born from raw, seething rage. Malkav would have had to laugh: how the pious seneschal had truly lost herself to his machinations; her demure façade was just that, but she was just as lost as the lot of them. Vicious in her anger. Vile in her actions.

 

A devil adorned was still a devil, after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> still experimenting with this; not super happy with this one, but it's worth sharing


End file.
